Organic Search – A search engine’s method of ranking and finding website content without the influence of paid advertising.

SERP – Search engine results page

Keyword Research

In this blog, I will help you improve your Keyword SEO results. I will take you on the steps I use daily to help clients build out a sustainable keyword strategy. I will also give you various resources to help you on your journey. This is not a quick-fix thing, but it is a good investment of your time. If you want to build a website presence with organic search best practices this is the place.

This goes beyond SEO because keyword marketing is an integral part of Social Media, SEO, and all marketing. The goal is to think like your customer. Then take the most important head terms also known as short-tail keywords and build a strategy that is competitive for your company to gain traction through optimization of keyword strategy (volume, click-potential, keyword difficulty) and long-tail keywords. This is the strategy in a nutshell.

Head/Short-tail Keywords – A popular keyword that generates a high volume of search results.

Long-tail Keywords – Longer, more specific keyword phrases that have lower search volumes but higher conversion rates.

So, let’s begin…

For example, The Insight Studio is a Marketing Technology company and one of our specialties is HubSpot technical consulting which involves HubSpot Migrations from other platforms like Salesforce and Pipedrive, implementations of HubSpot into business processes, and RevOps which is the combination of building sales revenue in your marketing operations. Download our cheatsheet Aligning_your_SEO_Strategy_with_your_Content_Creation_Strategy.

A potential customer might look up HubSpot Administration, HubSpot Implementations, or How to Clean my HubSpot data to look for help with the services we provide.

Here is a worksheet from HubSpot to help you do this for your own company. We will go over all the main steps in this blog. If you want to use a worksheet this is a free lesson from HubSpot Academy about Keyword Research. Please note you might need to sign up for a free HubSpot account to view this link:

Keyword Research for SEO

Keyword Research Step-by-Step

Step 1: Understand your customers and their goals

• • Build customer personas (age, gender, job title, income, etc.).

  • What are your customer’s goals, ambitions, obstacles, and struggles?

Step 2: Decide which topics you want to be known for

• • Create a list of all the important, relevant topics based on what you know about your business

    • HubSpot Administrator
    • HubSpot Implementation
    • CRM Help
    • Migration from Salesforce to HubSpot
    • RevOps with HubSpot.

Step 3: Find out what terms people are searching for online

• • Use tools like Google Keyword Planner, Moz Keyword Explorer, SEMrush, Ubersuggest, and Ahrefs, to look up keywords

    • Write down 10-15 keywords related to your core topic.
    • Think of phrases your customers might use to search for your product or service.
      
      

Step 4: Note search volume and competition

• • Use your keyword research tool of choice to take note of the monthly search volume and competition for each keyword on your list.
  • Based on the data you’ve gathered choose 5 to 8 keywords from this list to focus on.

• • Do a test on Google by looking at the first 5 results of each keyword and take note of similarities and content length.
  • Use words with some monthly search volume and low competition.

Search Volume – The average number of monthly searches for a keyword. 

Low Competition – Keywords that are medium to low search volume, but are easier to rank for. 

KD – Keyword Difficulty in this example "RevOps Agency" keyword has only a low number of 13 for KD; the lower the number the better the chance of getting noticed by SEO. 

Step 5: Organize your keywords into content clusters

• • Look for keywords that can share a content cluster that can be grouped under one topic. Download our SEO 
  • Build out Pillar pages on your website that contain the keywords in your content cluster.
  • Write high-quality content, blogs, videos, and social media that delight your customers and link to your Pillar page to create organic links that build out your SEO.

Conclusion

This strategy works. I have used it to gain top SEO placement on the SERP for The Insight Studio. And now you know the inside scoop on how to make a difference when it comes to SEO and Keyword Strategy. If you want to have an expert on your side to help with all of your technical marketing needs then call us or set up an appointment.  

In this blog, you learned how to use the SEO tools of the trade to look up keywords that are relevant to your website, build a keyword strategy to maximize your SEO, and get organic search visits to help grow your business.

Watch our interview with SEO expert: 

Blake Reichenbach

• In review to evaluate your Keywords:
  • Does the keyword have the traffic levels that will get views?
  • Do we have a chance to convert that keyword to traffic to our site?
  • Is the keyword a winnable option based on the statistics?
    
    

In our next SEO Series blog, we will cover How to do a site audit of your website.

Finding errors that harm your current search results and learning how to fix them. This makes your website search engine-friendly and makes it easier for you to rank keywords.

• Topics include:
  • How to fix SEO errors?
  • How to use Ubersuggest and SEMrush to do a site audit?
  • How to find the most harmful errors and prioritize them for the quickest results?
  • How to fix your onsite SEO errors?